Him
by Sugarflier
Summary: Leader Adrian Hale is...well very few people are sure of what he actually is. All people know is that he's dangerously brilliant, generally not well liked and not always on the side of the angels. So, armed with knowledge, weapons, technology and the rare ally, he figures outrunning the law will be a piece of cake.


Him

Chapter One

Thermals

* * *

Author's Note : Yes, this is my second attempt at this story, yes it's better than the first and no, I don't know if I'll continue this one either.

Doctor Who fic, not featuring the Doctor. It's set in the Doctor Who universe though, which belongs to the BBC, but features mostly original characters of mine, which obviously belong to me.

And no, Hale is not a Time Lord.

* * *

Leader Adrian Hale liked thermals. Black, white or grey usually. He liked long sleeves, he liked short sleeves, v-necks or o-necks, striped or plain. He just liked thermals. He liked the way they looked, he liked the warmth that they retained when he wore them. He also quite liked having a signature look. Leader Adrian Hale was a vain, self important kind of man. If he could even be considered a man at all.

He stood in the centre of a small, dank and dark control room. Old style computers were arranged in rows from one end of the room to the other, leaving very little space to actually get by. More often than not, Hale would just vault over the computers rather than make the trek around them. He was an active, physically fit man, as well as an impatient one.

As much as the control room looked old and primitive, that was only the case with the casing. Hale preferred the retro look. The processors inside, however, were some of the most powerful pieces of technology he had ever come across. In fact, the computers even had a consciousness.

"Found him," came a voice from behind Hale. He turned around to face his companion who had just spoken. He was a slim man with a clear complexion, a black comb over and a black suit with no tie. He was also transparent, and also the computers' consciousness.

"Nice work Qwerty," Hale smiled at his friend. "Open the rift."

The control room was also the only room on Leader Adrian Hale's ship. It was the only room that had been completed. There were no doors or windows either, just one single, seemingly inescapable room. But it was just that: seemingly. At Hale's request, Qwerty opened a rift. A rip tore through the air, just a jagged, black, flat shape that floated in the middle of the control room. This was his way out of the ship and into wherever the hell Leader Adrian Hale wanted to go.

Hale jumped through it. The scene in front of him was not what he had expected.

An alley in Glasgow city centre at half eleven during the night. One boy - maybe sixteen or so - lay on the ground a little bit away, bleeding from more bodily areas than not. He was not doing well.

Another boy, around the same age, leaned against a wall, blood pouring from his nose. He would be fine in a minute.

An older boy - eighteen or nineteen, Hale guessed - was under attack by two other younger boys. The older boy was against the wall, trying to absorb the other boys' punches with his arms. He had held out for a long time, especially against two attackers.

The boy on the ground wore black jeans, a band tee, lots of bracelets and lots of chains. Some unfortunate alternative kid that had been attacked by the other three tracksuit clad teenagers. Neds, as they were called in Scotland. The rarer, but more vicious Scottish breed of the English chav. Then, being heroic, the older boy had intervened, and was now 'getting his cunt kicked in', as the average Scot would describe it.

"Oh, bollocks," Hale groaned, before he could stop himself.

The tracksuit clad ned that had been leaning against the wall recovered and went for Hale. The two that had been attacking the older boy ditched him and went for Hale as well, only slightly behind their comrade.

He tried a gut punch, but Hale grabbed his wrist and smashed his forehead into the boy's mouth. Hale felt the teeth shatter just as he felt the little cut open on his forehead. The attack had hurt Hale too, but it had been worth it. Hale loved seeing the bastard little scumbag fall back screaming and crying, knowing that his smile would never be the same again. Hale knew people like this deserved everything that they got.

The other two reached Hale at roughly the same time, just after he had headbutted their friend. He sent a kick straight up at one of them, his heel striking the bottom of his chin, sending his head whipping back and a spurt of blood out his mouth. The boy was unconscious before he hit the ground. The other had a knife in his hand, which he sent at Hale's face. It was a wide, wild swing that Hale saw coming a mile away. His fingers closed around the boy's wrist before the knife came anywhere near him. Hale then sent a punch at the boy's armpit. Not an obvious target, but nonetheless an effective target area. The boy's fingers sprang open and released the knife just as Hale sent a second piston like punch at the boy's jaw, sending him hurtling into unconsciousness.

Hale had lived for a very, very long time, and he would not have lasted anywhere near as long had he not learned how to fight. Fighting was like second nature to Hale. He could think calmly and rationally in the middle of a skirmish, provided his opponents weren't too challenging. He was at ease doing it.

The same could not be said for the older boy, who pulled himself together and looked around frantically, panicking. He was still frightened after the fight. His nose and lips were burst, but other than that he wasn't seriously injured. The boy was slightly overweight, with messy, black hair, friendly features and a few spots - although, in general, his skin was very clear for someone his age.

This was Blair Carr. This was the teenager that Hale had been looking for.

Hale fully intended on introducing himself, but his timekeeping had been a little off and something interrupted him.

That something was a harvestman. A tall, humanoid creature dressed in jeans, boots and a white hoodie. Its nails were sharp and black while its skin was fragile and pale. The hood was down, casting its face in shadow. Hale knew what the face peering out at them from beneath the hood looked like, however, and it was not pretty.

It was maybe twenty feet down the alley. It started running, clearing five metres per second. No more, no less.

One second had passed.

"Run!" Hale screamed at Blair, who was already on his way down the alley, away from the harvestman. Hale followed, easily keeping pace with the unfit boy.

Two seconds had passed.

Hale pushed Blair through a door, leading to a set of inside stairs that smelled faintly of urine. Hale bundled in after him.

Three seconds had passed.

Hale slammed the door shut and pressed his back against it, keeping the harvestman out.

The fourth second didn't quite have time to pass.

"Don't look under its hood," Hale advised.

"Why not?" Blair asked, crouching to try and get a view of the creature's face. "Oh fuck. Fuck, fuck, what the fuck is that?" Blair had taken half a dozen steps back and was fighting the urge to be sick.

"That's why," Hale answered.

The harvestman stepped away from the door and out of sight.

"It's gone," Blair sighed, exhaling in relief.

"Shit," was Hale's response.

"Why's that bad?" Blair asked, concern washing over his bloodied face.

"Because it's coming after us," Hale told him.

"Shit," Blair said, echoing what Hale had said not three seconds earlier.

"My name's Hale," Hale introduced himself. "So, listen, when that thing finds us we have about four seconds to get the hell away," he informed the teenager. "You got that?"

"Yeah, whatever," Blair dismissed, really not interested. "What the fuck was that thing?" That's what he really wanted to know.

"It's called a harvestman," Hale revealed. That was all he planned to tell the boy - anything more would just confuse him at present.

"Come on, that's got to be a monster. You hunt them, right?" Hale figured that this kid watched far too many fantasy shows on TV.

"I'm looking for a person, not a monster," Hale told him. "And you're going to help me find that person." Hale walked off, finding the stairs leading up to the flats above and ascending them. Blair followed without question.

"How do we kill a harvestman?" Blair asked as they ascended. He had a feeling that Hale wanted silence, but he talked anyway.

"We don't," Hale replied curtly.

"What if we shoot it in the head?" Blair figured that out to kill most things.

"It doesn't have a brain, it operates out of several ganglia, so a single head shot is unlikely to stop it," Hale told him, then made no further effort to continue conversation.

"Can we shoot it in the heart?" The heart was another that seemed to pretty much put down anything.

"If you can hit all three of its hearts then be my guest, but otherwise you get the fuck out of there," came Hale's reply.

"What if we shoot it in the dick? Come on, nothing wants to be shot in the dick." And while Blair did have a very good point, this was still not a solution.

"They don't have genitals. They're infertile," Hale informed him. "And they don't feel pain anyway," he added.

"Beheading kills everything, doesn't it?" Blair was now descending into ideas stemming from TV shows about the supernatural.

"If you're close enough to behead a harvestman, then it's close enough to kill you first." So, once again, Leader Adrian Hale shot Blair down in flames.

"Oh." Blair waited for a few seconds for a comment from Hale, but he got none. "What's a ganglia?"

"Oh my God, do you ever shut up?" Hale seemed to be asking a genuine question.

"Not often," Blair replied smugly. Blair often felt smug when he came up with what he considered a decent comeback.

Hale had to hold back from blurting out information that would shatter the boy's world perception. Leader Adrian Hale was a petty, vindictive man too.

So they ascended the stairs in silence until they came to the top floor. "That leads to the roof, you know," Blair called out when Hale continued climbing the stairs.

"Oh yeah, I know," Hale reassured him. Blair once again followed. He was an adventurous, faithful boy.

They ascended the last of the stairs and emerged through a door and onto a plain, uninteresting roof. Hale walked to the edge and looked out across the city of Glasgow, taking in the city. Blair stepped up beside him. "Please just tell me what's happening," Blair said. A simple request. And for the first time since he had met Hale, he seemed sincere. Not cocky or anything, just genuine.

"That thing was an experiment," Hale finally relented. Introducing people like Blair to this sort of world was a delicate task. He didn't want to shatter the boy's world perception.

"Right, so what's the deal with it? Why is it so dangerous?" Fear was starting to set in for Blair. The thrill still outweighed the fear, but the fear was there nonetheless.

"When we're in its line of sight it closes the distance between us in four seconds, regardless of the actualy distance between us. Four seconds. No more, no less." Hale was nervous about how Blair would react. Blair Carr was not the first person Hale had had to introduce to his world, but that didn't make it any less worrying.

"That doesn't make any sense," Blair pointed out.

"It's just science. If you told someone from the second century that moving pictures existed in the future, I don't think they'd believe it either. This is the same." Hale made a very good point, and it was a point that also made the fact easier for Blair to swallow.

"Okay, whatever," Blair sighed, pushing it out of his mind. Technicalities. He didn't need to worry about the how or the why, Blair just needed to know the facts. "But who are you looking for? You said earlier you were looking for someone."

"I don't know what he looks like or what he calls himself, but I know what he's been up to," Hale told him simply. Hale didn't like admitting that he lacked knowledge of something.

"So why are we on the roof?" Blair asked him. "I mean, I get that you're looking for some guy, but I doubt you could spot him from a roof," he pointed out.

"We're on the roof because I'm going to kill a harvestman," Hale smiled. "Now go and duck behind something," he instructed Blair, then turned around and walked to the corner of the building, putting as much distance between himself and the door that they had just come through as possible. Hale stared at said door for the next few minutes, just waiting.

Blair jumped behind a large electric fan, the slitted plastic casing allowing Blair to see through while he could not be seen himself. From his vantage point he observed, thinking of how Hale could possibly kill something so dangerous when he appeared totally unarmed.

A few minutes later, the harvestman burst through the door. It was a good twenty metres from Hale, who just stood at the corner of the building looking stoic as hell. His confident little smirk was gone. Blair wasn't sure whether he was genuinely feeling scared now that he was in the situation or just didn't want his opponent to see how confident he was. And as soon as the harvestman caught sight of Hale, it started moving.

It was moving at five metres a second. It was going fast, and it was moving fast. It held its arms out in front of it, grasping at the air with its fingernails. That's when Blair noticed something peculiar - all of the creature's limbs seemed to have two joints between shoulder and wrist rather than one, like it had two elbows in each arm and two knees in each leg. So it sprinted towards Hale, who had a handful of seconds and apparently no way to escape. But still, he faced the oncoming creature without so much as a tremble. Then when the creature reached him, Hale sidestepped and tripped it, sending it tumbling over the edge of the building.

Blair scrambled over the fan that he was hiding behind and rushed over to meet Hale, who was running back to the door, blood running down his left forearm.

"That was awesome! I mean..." Blair beamed at Hale, then noticed the blood running down his arm. Some of it was black. "Are you okay...?" He asked uncertainly.

"It got me with its fingernails - they're toxic by the way," he explained. "But I knew what I was going up against, I'm prepared," he added, retrieving a vial of what looked like cloudy water from a chain around his neck and swallowing the liquid. Blair got worried and then relaxed, both in the same second. "But we seriously need to get down there and look at that body before somebody finds it," he went on, then proceeded to rush down the stairs.

"Hey, wait!" Blair called after him, giving chase. Leader Adrian Hale would do no such thing.

Blair powered down the stairs as fast as his legs would carry him, but that was still a good bit slower than how fast Leader Adrian Hale's legs could carry him. The results was Blair trying in vain to catch up with the older man as he steadily got further and further from the teenager.

By the time the teenager got out of the building, Leader Adrian Hale was nowhere to be seen. Then again, he was going after the body of the harvestman, and the harvestman was at the other side of the building, so that's where Blair headed. He ran out of the alley where he first encountered Leader Adrian Hale and back out onto the Glasgow streets. He ran along the length of the building to the other side and sprinted down another alley where the body had landed.

"Definitely dead," Hale proclaimed as Blair neared him. He was just crouching by the unusually large corpse - now that Blair got a good look, it must have been at least seven feet tall. Blair noticed that Hale's boots were flecked with blood as he took a syringe from the pocket of his jeans and took a blood sample from its neck.

"Well I should fucking hope so," Blair replied. "You tripped it from a fucking building," he pointed out.

"And I got some samples of various things from it, so we're done here," he announced, standing up and pushing his long hair out of his eyes. A brief look of contemplation crossed his face before he pulled out a blackberry, typed a quick message and sent it. "Just alerting UNIT," he explained to Blair.

"What the hell is that?" He asked, lost.

"UNIT's still a secret thing?" Hale asked, genuinely surprised.

"Apparently," Blair confirmed.

"Well fuck," Hale sighed, dismissing the issue with a wave of his hand. "Right," he exclaimed, clapping his hands and startling Blair. "Back to the Knife," he added, then clicked his fingers. A black shape appeared in front of Hale, which looked to Blair just like a tear in the fabric of time and space. Just a tall, ragged, black shape that floated there. And Hale jumped through it and disappeared.

Blair followed with hardly a second thought.


End file.
